At Balkanization, Mark Graber makes a great point about the Summers fracas: Why does the president of Harvard focus only on those academic areas where superficial numbers suggest boys do slightly better than girls, ignoring those academic areas where initial impressions suggest girls do much better than boys?...
Like a white knight (and I mean that in every sense of the phrase), Chuck Murray rides to the rescue of Larry Summers and all who would like to believe that.
I vividly remember Johnny Carson's last show, in 1992. Why can I remember the year? Well, the same night I saw Lou Reed at the Theatre St. Denis (great show,.
I'm sure that this isn't literally without precedent, but the Steelers are 3 point underdogs today. I certainly can't remember a healthy home team being an underdog in a conference championship game. I can see a rational argument that this is underrating them; the Steelers won't...
The best defense of Bush v. Gore was written by Richard Posner. It was still strikingly unpersuasive, but since Posner is a pragmatist it did have the advantage of not trying to.
Elton Beard catches the LA Times publishing some fake grass. (And it isn't even that shiny new Field Turf; it seems more like the worn-out turf they had at the.
As an interlude, I thought it would be useful to link to this old post, which brings up an empirical fact that rarely makes it into "counterintuitive" arguments about how the widely-despised Roe v. Wade is destroying the Democratic Party: the public favors it by a two-to-one margin. I'm...
I promise that the name of this blog will not be changed to "Scott replies to Matthew Yglesias posts about judicial policy-making," but since I promised (threatened?) a legal defense.
In honor of MLK day, David Ehrenstein has a great post on John F. Kennedy's (The "F" stands for "It's never the right time") attempts to strenuously avoid any political risk.
There are two major potential drawbacks to litigation as a strategy. One--that it is particularly likely to generate a backlash--I recently discussed. The other is captured by Matthew Yglesias's "fat and lazy" hypothesis: relying on litigation makes progressives less effectual in other political arenas. (This can...
It's a shame that I have never heard of this before, because it sounds like the greatest thing ever. The idea for pairing Buckley and the unpredictable Vidal had come from.
It's not every day that major bloggers are discussing the subject of my dissertation research, so I suppose I'll dive in to the discussion between Nathan Newman and Kevin Drum. This is.